World Cup champion Ruby Tui, Israel Adesanya, and Will Smith are all featured on Google’s ‘Year in Search’ - a big ol’ round-up of what searches in Aotearoa were trending in 2022. Everything from sports, celebrities who passed, movies, 'how to' questions, and more are covered in the list.
The #1 top trending search for 2022 from Kiwis was ‘Wordle’ - the simple game where you’ve got six attempts to guess a five-letter word.
Reminders of Covid came in at #2 and #4 with ‘Locations of Interest’ and ‘Covid Cases Today’ taking out those spots respectively. NZ's new public holiday 'Matariki' came in at #9.
When it comes to the big celebrity names Kiwis searched for this year Johnny Depp and Amber Heard were #1 and #2 thanks to airing their dirty laundry out in front of the whole world.
Will Smith was third, which must have been a big slap in the face to Chris Rock, who was #7.
Google also listed the most popular fellow Kiwis we all searched for this year. The PM’s fiance Clarke Gayford, pro golfer Ryan Fox, and gold medal-winning snowboarder Zoe Sadowski-Synott came in at #1, #2, and #3 respectively.
Our (sadly former) UFC champion Israel Adesanya was fifth, just behind Lydia Ko at #4. Fellow sportspeople Joseph Parker and Ruby Tui were #9 and #10 respectively.
Taika Waititi’s ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ was the film Kiwis searched for the most this year, with ‘Top Gun’ coming in at #2. ‘The Batman’, ‘Encanta’, and ‘Black Adam’ round out the top 5.
When it comes to the top 5 TV shows Kiwis were searching for HBO and Netflix dominated the top 5. The former’s ‘Euphoria’ and ‘House of Dragons’ were #1 and #5 respectively, while the latter had the second, third, and fourth spots with ‘Stranger Things’, ‘The Watcher’, and ‘Manifest’.
Google also released the stuff we wanted to learn to do and we wanna know who was googling 'How to be single' which was the ninth most searched for 'How to' for Kiwis. First was 'How to do a rat test', #2 was 'How to play Wordle'. 'How to find Matariki' was fifth on the list.
